We present Open Trumps, a version of the popular card game Top Trumps with decks that are procedurally gen- erated based on open data. The game is played among multiple players through drawing cards and selecting the feature that is most likely to trump the same feature on the other players’ cards. Players can generate their own decks through choosing a suitable dataset and setting cer- tain attributes; the generator then generates a balanced and playable deck using evolutionary computation. In the exam- ple dataset, each card represents a country and the features represent such entities as GDP per capita, mortality rate or tomato production, but in principle any dataset organ- ised as instances with numerical features could be used. We also report the results of an evaluation intended to investi- gate both player experience and the hypothesis that players learn about the data underlying the deck they play with, since understanding the data is key to playing well. The results show that players enjoy playing the game, are enthu- siastic about its potential and answer questions related to decks they have played significantly better than questions related to decks they have not played.

Publisher

Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games

Host/Issue

FDG 2014 Proceedings : Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games;